Carbon Tax Split on the Northern Border

The victory of climate change-denying Republican candidate Donald Trump was one of two big setbacks for U.S. climate policy earlier this month. The other was the resounding defeat of Washington State’s Initiative 732, which sought to prove that using fees on carbon emissions to cut existing taxes could provide bipartisan appeal for what economists consider to be the most efficient mechanism to cut greenhouse gas emissions: carbon taxes. Washington State rejected the carbon tax by 59 percent to 41. In sharp contrast, just across the world’s longest border, carbon taxes are attracting politically diverse support. Four-fifths of Canadians will live in provinces with such taxes in 2017, and in 2018 all Canadians could be paying a carbon tax. Read on at MIT Technology Review…

A few caveats and details left on the cutting room floor:

The carbon trading scheme operated by California, Quebec and Ontario has a rising floor price for credits, currently set at roughly C$15, that makes it act like a carbon tax at times (like now) of soft demand for tradable credits.

These states and provinces are — like carbon tax innovator British Columbia — coupling their carbon pricing schemes with regulations such as restrictions on coal-fired power that drive more reductions and do so at lower political risk. For more on this (and more) see my carbon pricing explainer in Ensia from this summer.

Canada’s promised emissions reduction for 2030 fails, like most national commitments made at last year’s Paris climate talks, to put global emissions on a trajectory to meet the Paris Agreement’s fundamental goal: holding global warming to well below 2 degrees C.